To examine the association of faculty- and student-level characteristics with the quality of medical students' narrative evaluations in the medicine and neurology clerkships.

Narrative approaches to assessment provide meaningful and valid representations of trainee performance. Yet, narratives are frequently perceived as vague, nonspecific, and low quality. To date, there is little research examining factors associated with narrative evaluation quality, which can inform faculty development efforts.

We reviewed faculty narrative evaluations of 50 students who completed their medicine and neurology clerkships, resulting in 165 and 87 unique evaluations in the neurology and medicine clerkships, respectively. We evaluated narrative evaluation quality using the previously validated Narrative Evaluation Quality Instrument (NEQI). Linear mixed effects modelling was used to predict total NEQI score (maximum 12 points). Explanatory covariates included: time to evaluation completion, number of weeks spent with student, faculty total weeks on service per year, total faculty years in clinical education, student gender, faculty gender, and an interaction term between student and faculty gender.

Significantly higher narrative evaluation quality was associated with a shorter time to evaluation completion, with NEQI scores decreasing by approximately .3 points every 10 days following students' rotations (p =.004). Additionally, female faculty had statistically higher quality narrative evaluations with NEQI scores 1.81 points greater than their male counterparts (p =.012). All other covariates were not significant.

The quality of medical students' narrative evaluations was associated with time to evaluation completion and faculty gender, but not faculty experience in clinical education, faculty weeks on service, or the amount of time spent with students. Findings can inform faculty development efforts to improve the quality of student evaluation by promoting processes that facilitate timely completion. In addition, further investigation should explore the quality disparity by faculty gender, and its impact on faculty professional development.